Giancarlo Forte

Giancarlo Forte is a Senior Lecturer in Cardiac Mechanobiology at the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Centre of Excellence at the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine and Sciences (SCMMS), King’s College London, United Kingdom.

He is also member of the Medical Research Council / British Heart Foundation (MRC/BHF) Centre of Excellence for Advanced Cardiac Therapeutics (REACT) at KCL.

At the College, Forte serves as a member of the Executive Board of the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine and Sciences and is Cross-cutting Theme Lead - Basic Cardiovascular and Metabolic investigations.

Dr. Forte obtained his PhD in 2005 in Experimental Pathophysiology. After his graduation, he was a visiting researcher at the University Karls Eberhard in Tuebingen, Germany.

Next, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the Italian Institute for Cardiovascular Research (INRC), where he was awarded the Young Investigator Award for his research on cell-matrix interaction in 2008.

During his postdoctoral experience, he was a visiting scientist at Tokyo Women’s Medical University (2006), and at National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS, 2010) in Japan.

In 2010 he was appointed a Senior Researcher at NIMS, in Japan and MANA Scientist at the World Premiere Institute for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) in the same Country, where he worked until 2013.

From 2014 to 2023 he served as Founding Director of the Center for Translational Medicine (CTM) at the International Clinical Research Center, an Institute of excellence established by European Union within St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic (FNUSA-ICRC).

From 2019 to 2021 he also served as Deputy Director for Science of the same institute, where he founded the Competence Center for Mechanobiology in Regenerative Medicine, an Austria-Czech Republic joint initiative and the first research center of this kind in Czech Republic.

He sits in numerous PhD boards in Italy, Czech Republic and UK, is the Vice Chair of the p303 scientific board of the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) and member of the Working Group on ‘Disease Models/iPS Cells/Organoids’, European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT) and of the Working Group on Cellular Biology of the Heart of the European Society for Cardiology (ESC).

Forte lab focuses on pathological mechanosensing and is mainly funded by grants awarded by Horizon Europe, British Heart Foundation (BHF) and Medical Research Council (MRC). The lab identified the positive loop by which Yes Associated Protein (YAP) reinforces focal adhesion assembly in breast cancer cells (Nardone et al., Nat Commun 2017) and disclosed the molecular basis of force-regulated RNA alternative splicing in the failing human heart (Martino et al., Sci Transl Med 2022). Additionally, they unveiled the role of YAP mechanosensor in perpetuating adverse ventricular ECM remodelling in the failing human heart (Perestrelo et al., Circ Res 2021) and in tumour chemoresistance against nanodrugs (Cassani et al., Adv Sci 2024; Cassani et al., Nano Letters 2025).

So far, Dr. Forte authored more than 90 publications, 1 international patent, and 7 book chapters; his H-index is 31 according to Clarivate Scopus. His publications appeared on leading journals like Science Translational Medicine, Circulation Research, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews in Cardiology and others and were cited more than 5000 times.